It's a Wonderful Life
by Beyond-BB-Birthday
Summary: Dear Diary: My name is Kenny, and I'm crazy. A look at how life turned out for the four boys. Implied Stendy and K2.


I don't own Forrest Gump or It's a Wonderful Life, both of which are mentioned. I also don't own Sunlife Financial, which is parodied. Rated for language and tragedy that may offend some readers. Beware :3

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Dear Diary,

Well, my name's Kenny, and I'm crazy. My stupid bitch of a psychiatrist thought it would be good to 'channel my negative energy' into 'expressing my feelings' through writing in a diary.

When I told her to fuck off, however, she reminded me that she was a 'trained professional', and that I was paying her to help me. So, here we are.

I guess I'll start talking about my life. Is that how this shit works? Why the hell am I asking a book, anyways? Ah, well, I suppose I'll begin 'expressing my feelings' anyhow.

Let's start with…my family. I guess they screwed me up right from the start. Long story short: they're pricks. But I know my therapist, Kathy won't go for that, and knowing her, she'll probably be reading all my personal private thoughts before long. So, to avoid further bitching, I'll elaborate.

Well, my parents never actually had jobs. My dad just sat around on his ass drinking beer all day, and my mother would go out, or sit up in the bathroom and cry. Most of the time they didn't even know I existed. I guess for some kids that would have been great, but for me it mostly just made me sad.

I don't know how my brother, Kev managed it. He was older than me, but he was smaller for his age. He was pretty smart, but didn't have many friends or self-esteem. I guess that was my dad's fault. My dad chose him to get all pissy at when he was drunk or angry. Pissy, meaning he beat the living shit out of him. He even sexually abused him once or twice. That I know of.

When my dad tried to pull that on me, I just wouldn't stand for it. He hit me, I'd kick him in the nuts, and he'd back off. We had an understanding that I simply _would not_let him touch me. Having grown up with Cartman helped, but Kevin didn't get it that all he really had to do was tell him 'no,' nice and seriously.

It wasn't my fault, but it felt like it was. But what could I have done?

Now my mom, she was just sad. My dad was angry, but my mom was so depressed I worried about her sanity. And my dad never even touched her. Sometimes she would just lock herself up in her room and wouldn't come out for hours. Wasn't much we could do for her, so mostly we all left her alone. I guess that was what she wanted.

My brother was the worst, though. We shared a bedroom, we shared furniture, hell, we even shared clothes. We were closer than some people might've thought. But there were some things that I just couldn't figure out about him.

For instance: I never saw him cry, but there he was, every night when he came home with puffy, red eyes. Also, when we were camping and I needed to borrow his knife to make firewood, and he claimed he didn't have one. But his arms were all scared up for the next two years, and I knew it wasn't from my dad.

As a last example, Kevin once told me that he didn't hate our dad for what he did to him, and that he wasn't depressed, and didn't need help.

And a few weeks later, three days after his fifteenth birthday, he died of a self-inflicted bullet trauma wound to the left temple. And unlike me, he didn't come back. It was the absolute worst day of my life. And that's saying a lot. And in the immortal words of Mr. Gump, that's all I have to say about that.

Alright, so that's my family. Moving on to…my friends, I suppose.

On the first day of kindergarten, I met Stan, Kyle and Eric Cartman. Cartman was an ass, but Stan and Kyle were great. We grew up together as best friends. We did everything together.

I died a lot more when I was a kid than I do now. That made a difference in our friendship. I wasn't around as often, so Stan and Kyle grew closer. They were 'super' best friends, so most people assumed Cartman and I were. We let them think as they pleased, but that was far from the truth in most occasions when we were real young. Most of the time in middle school, it was just me kicking his ass for making fun of me, my friends, and my family.

But there were times that he was there and Stan and Kyle weren't. The first time I got beat up by Wendy in seventh grade, having been there himself, Cartman understood. Meanwhile Stan was on Wendy's side, and Kyle claimed he 'didn't want to get involved.'

And then, when Kev died, he put away the asshole attitude and got serious for me for a few days. Stan and Kyle just said that they weren't going near that with an eighty-meter pole, for which, I can't really blame them. If it were Ike or Shelly, I'd probably do the same.

But other than that, he was the jerk, and Stan and Kyle were my only real friends. But things do change.

Okay, where to next…I guess that would be…where everyone's coming from, if you get me. And no, Kathy, I don't mean it like that, you masochistic bitch.

Well, Stan was always the bravest, and the strongest – both physically and mentally. He was captain of the football team, so he was popular, too. Too popular for Kyle, Eric and I, but he still stuck around as much as he could. He was nice, but not overly so. He wasn't smart, but wasn't stupid either. To most, he was a pretty regular guy.

His parents weren't bad people, but they weren't exactly geniuses. They treated Stan okay, but most of the time just didn't get him. It's understandable, I guess. People are complicated. And Shelly. She was Stan's older sister, and a bitch extraordinaire. I barely knew the girl and I still hated her. Stan did too – they weren't as close as, say, Kyle and Ike or Kevin and I, but they were still family. But after we graduated, I never saw her again.

I knew him better than most people did. And sometimes, I even knew him better than his Super Best Friend, Kyle did. Like, I knew that Stan was failing most of his classes in twelfth grade and Kyle didn't. Stan said he didn't have the heart to tell him that his tutoring and all of his help wasn't working.

Also, I know that Stan started smoking in seventh grade. He told Kyle he started in eleventh, but he lied. That was another thing about Stan. He was one hell of a liar. And he covered up the smoke on his breath around Kyle for what, four, five years? Pretty impressive.

Anyways, on to Kyle. If Einstein was smart, then Kyle was a fucking super genius. Seriously, he's one hundred percent the smartest guy I've ever met. Some people might call him a nerd or a geek, but I have a lot of respect for the guy.

After all, he got a one hundred in grade ten physics, and I got a sixty-one, and I'm not a stupid person, to be honest.

Other than his intellect, Kyle's really nice and understanding…most of the time. And he'll help you when you need it. But he's set off too easily. You say one thing and all of a sudden he's lunging across the table at you. Mostly he saved that for Cartman, but Stan and I got our share of hatred. Of course, he stopped beating on us when we got to high school, and suddenly we were six-foot-two and he was barely five-six.

Like I do with Stan, I know stuff about Kyle that some might not. It's actually like that with a lot of people. They trust me, because they know I'm reliable. And for the most part, I keep every secret thrown my way.

Anyways. The times when Kyle told me stuff that even Stan didn't know made our friendship just that much stronger. For example, in twelfth when he finally decided he was gay, he told me first, and I kept it inside. I felt…I don't know, special, in being the first and only person he told for the longest time. Out of everyone he knew, he chose me to tell something important to.

Well, we hooked up and kept it quiet until our third year at Denver U, when he came out and we decided to just be friends. It was more like Stan decided for us, since he wouldn't let me touch him when he found out, but that's a story for another day. It wasn't a big deal; it just confused me at first, as to why he thought I'd hurt him. After all, in three years of keeping our relationship a secret, we'd never even fought once. But on the other hand, the words 'I love you' were strictly off-limits – so it's not like we were really 'together' or anything.

I don't know what it is with Kyle in specific, but I think I'd say I'm closest to him. I don't think it has anything to do with the fact that we screwed for four years. Honestly, I'm serious. He just seems so much…different than Stan or Cartman, like we just get along better. But I'll leave it at that.

On to Cartman. Seemed like an asshole most of the time, but if you really took the time to get to know the guy, it was worth it. If you needed him to be serious, he could smarten up. But the rest of the time, if you could get past the sheer crudeness of his sense of humor, he really was a funny guy.

Besides, (and I'm not going to say that it isn't his own fault,) he didn't have any other friends. I mean _any_. He and Token got along sometimes, but other than that, I was all he really had that was close to a friend. (Besides Stan and Kyle of course, but most of the time they claimed to hate his anti-Semitic guts.)

Now I knew a few things about Stan and Kyle, but I knew so much about Eric it was practically a sin. He told me every time a girl rejected him, the first time he had sex, and, most importantly, when he decided to enlist.

Despite outwardly hating him, we were actually kind of sad to see him get shipped off to Iraq. He was a Frontline Infantry Soldier. Stan, Kyle and I knew what that meant. Something made me wonder like hell why he wanted to go over there, but something told me he had a good reason.

We would always joke about how 'awesome' it would be when he got suicide-bombed by some pissed-off Muslim, but it really wasn't funny at all. To be honest, we all knew that the letter would come someday soon, and we would all be sad. We were all dreading it. I guess making fun of it was our way of coping with the fact that we'd probably never see him alive again.

I tried not to think about it.

I guess now I'll talk about me for a bit. I'm skinny, tall and blonde. That's pretty much all there is to me. I'm pretty bright, kinda sarcastic, pretty fun to be around… to be honest, on the surface, I'm a simple guy. Most people would just call me a slut or a whore and fail to see deeper into my personality, but I'm okay with that. Anyone who thinks like that probably isn't worth getting to know.

I had a few other friends in high school and college. There was Butters; we slept together for a while. That was post-Kyle, though. He was shy and kinda anxious all the time. But when we graduated from DU, we just went our separate ways. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, he now lives in New York, as a dance choreographer. Who would've thought?

There was Tweek, Craig, Wendy, Bebe, Red, Nelly, Jimmy, Timmy…I was actually pretty popular. But most of those people left the state after twelfth grade, (who could blame them?) and that left me with Stan and Kyle.

Let's jump to where we all are today, shall we, Diary? (And you too, Kathy.)

Well, I got a swimming scholarship to Denver U, (obviously I had no money or school skills.) and Kyle got in on academics. Stan took a year off to work for the tuition fee, seeing as how fucking _Clyde_ got the damn football money from South Park High, and they only wanted him. Damn, you should've seen the boy. He was so depressed and over-worked I honestly though he was going to overload.

But Stan got the money and joined us at DU, a year under us. I barely scraped an English major degree with minors in business and marketing, while Kyle graduated in the top five percentile for our class with a PhD in medicine. A doctor. He could've been anything he wanted, but he went for something involving helping people – so like Kyle.

A year later, Kyle became the Dean of Medicine at Hell's Pass Hospital, I was out of work, trying to scrape by on a cashier's salary, and Stan got out of college with a bunch of letters after his name. Three weeks later he was a certified Research Analyst. Three months after that, he got engaged to Wendy Testaburger. And, Kyle had a boyfriend.

Damn their successful asses.

But since then, I've obviously picked things up. Got this sweet job at Starhuck's as a marketing exec, basically in charge of making sure people know we exist. Not exactly hard work eh?

But when Stan and I were twenty-four and Cartman and Kyle were twenty-five, along came the day I got the letter announcing Eric's death. Obviously, his mother got the real letter from the army and Stan, Kyle and I actually got a letter from her telling us what happened.

I didn't realize how sad it would be. I thought it would be like when Kev died. I got over that relatively quickly because I _had_to focus on school at the time, but when Cartman died, it was terrible. It lasted forever, like there was a caterpillar in my heart, slowly but surely gnawing away at it. Maybe because I knew him longer, maybe because I knew it was going to happen.

To be honest, I don't know what made me cry like I did for him. But it was different than it was with Kevin.

I don't know if Stan and Kyle ever felt like that. They were sad for a while, but had to get back up. Stan had a wife by then, and a kid on the way. He couldn't be sad. He had to be happy for Wendy and his soon-to-be daughter. And Kyle had one of the most important jobs in South Park. If he slipped up, He'd be toast.

But me, my job wasn't too important and I didn't have anyone else in my life but those two. So I had time to dwell on it. I had time to take a quick drive down to the cemetery every week and stare at that rock with his name carved into it. And do that I did.

It's weird how one day you can act like you hate someone, and the next, be crying over his grave in front of his mother.

So then I got a cat. Actually, it was Cartman's old cat, Mr. Kitty Junior, the baby of the first Mr. Kitty, who actually turned out to be a Mrs. Anyways, Liane didn't want him around anymore and said I could take him.

Cats are great. They just sit there and it seems like they listen to what you're saying, but really they're only around you either because you have food or you're warmer than them. But for a while, having a cat listen to my problems was the only thing I could afford. (Before I sold my soul to pay for you, of course, Kath.)

By then almost a year had gone by, and I forced myself out of the shitter. It had to be done. I was _this_ close to losing my job, and I desperately needed it. It was the 2020s. Hard to find work, and when you could, you clung to it for dear life.

So anyways, I forced myself to forget about Cartman. I smartened up in my job and got back on track. Stan had forgotten a long time ago, of course, and now had a baby girl to take care of and Wendy to look after. We hadn't even talked in a while. In fact, the last time I'd seen him personally was at Eric's funeral. He had a life now. It was time I got one myself.

But, like I said, Kyle and I were the closest. He and Stan still saw each other every now and then, but it seemed Kyle and _I_ were going out to clubs and bars, just to have something to take our mind off of life, every weekend.

It was fun. On the outside. Inside, it was simply even more depressing.

So eventually, Kyle admitted that he was still down about Cartman, and was being let go at the hospital due to impaired judgment and personal problems. Then we went to a shitty, run-down bar where I let him get piss drunk, throw up in my car and lay me in the backseat.

I always wondered how Stan found out about that. Kyle said he didn't say anything, and I know I sure as hell didn't. But one day, he just called me up, out of the blue after we hadn't spoken in three months and asked me what the hell I thought I was doing.

I then proceeded to tell him to mind his own fucking business. That was five years ago. I hadn't heard from him again until almost a year ago.

So eventually Kyle lost his job. He lost his apartment and he lost Stan. He was a wreck. I knew that inviting him to stay with me wouldn't help his relationship with Stan seeing as how he seems to hate my guts, but Kyle said it was a lost cause and nothing could make him change his mind.

I can't believe I let something as stupid as intimacy ruin my friendship with Stan. But I did, and now Kyle was all I had.

Kyle had lots of doctor friends from work. He had friends from college. I only had him, and there was no way I was going to risk our friendship to be with him like _that_. I tried to explain that to him, but he simply didn't get it. He was the only person I had, and he wanted to put it on the line. For a while, I hated him for it. It was like he didn't care about us being friends at all, and that made me pissed.

Soon, though, I needed him. I think he needed me too, because we both ended up giving in. I said we could be together, and Kyle said he could live with us just being friends. So, we went with the one involving sex. We were a couple again.

Goddammit.

So anyways, that went on for a few years. Eventually Kyle said those forbidden words and ruined it, and now we are once again, just friends. It's not his fault. It's mine. I just can't stand commitment, especially when I already have so much crap going on in my life. Kyle understands. At least, he says he does. He thinks I can't hear him crying in the shower, but I do. And it makes me feel like a shitbag. But at the time, something else to worry about was the last thing I needed in my life.

I guess that brings us up to about a year ago.

That was around when we moved. Kyle and I said 'to hell with Colorado', ditched our shit lives down there, and moved to New Jersey. Kyle got a new hospital job and got his own place and I started managing an insurance company by the name of 'Moonlife'. I'm currently CEO of the main business place, actually. That's about a hundred and fifty thousand a year. Nice.

But it wasn't nice for very long.

Neither Kyle nor I was thinking about Stan. Not even a little. We were both becoming successful businesspeople now, and we didn't even know where he lived, what he was doing or if he even remembered us at all. Turns out, he did.

He gave us a call one night when we were at some rave. Though we were almost in our thirties, we still acted like teenagers sometimes. Anyways, he called us, his voice all cracked and shaky. He sounded terrible. So, I dragged Kyle back to my place to talk to him.

Before we knew what else to do, we were throwing our amazingly rich and successful lives in New Jersey away to head back to the place and the people we'd been trying to escape. Stupid South Park.

He wouldn't tell us what was up over the phone, only begged us to come back. When we did, he told us the worst news we'd thought of while we were worrying our asses back to Colorado.

On their way home from their daughter, Kelly's ballet recital, Stan, Wendy and Kelly had gotten into a car accident. Stan lived. His wife and daughter died gruesomely. He quit his job because he couldn't get up in the morning to leave for work. He had no one. Until we came back, that is.

His insurance rates skyrocketed, and because it was his fault, and not the other driver's, he lost even more money. He was a wreck, and we tried our best to pull him up by the bootstraps and fix him.

We tried, at least.

I guess it goes to show that nothing in life stays the way you want it to.

That brings us to a month ago. That was when Stan committed suicide. The worst part was he did it ten feet from where I was sleeping, in my old apartment. I had to wake up to see his body hung from a noose right in front of me. I had to cut him down. That ruined me. I just couldn't take it. That was the night I went insane.

So now, I fall asleep and wake up to the sounds of my own terrified screams. I have night terrors whenever I close my eyes. Kyle simply doesn't sleep anymore. He doesn't eat, barely breathes and doesn't leave the apartment most days. I have to keep us up, though. And it takes a lot. I can't suffer like Kyle does. I have to be strong or else we'll lose the very little we still had. Kyle is so destroyed that I have to work two jobs to keep our rent afloat.

This time, it was different. When Kevin died, I got over it. When Cartman died, it took a while, but I got over him too. With Stan, I know I'll never 'get over it'. I'm too far fallen. It's just too hard.

I guess that's why I have a psychiatrist.

So that's me. All about Kenny McKormick, and why I am crazy. I guess it's true what they say, eh? It's a wonderful fucking life. Wonderful. Glorious. Beautiful.

Happy reading, Kathy.

~ Kenny.

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